Archives

Archives for September 2005

My old friend, game designer extraordinaire Greg Costikyan, has been ranting about the depressing state of the games industry recently. Tonight he announced that he is getting off his rhetorical duff and going to try to do something about its problems. He quit his job and is forming a new company called Manifesto Games.

Its motto is “PC Gamers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Retail Chains!” And its purpose, of course, will be to build what I’ve been talking about: a viable path to market for independent developers, and a more effective way of marketing and distributing niche PC game styles to gamers.

Greg is also planning to write about the whole process of launching the company on his blog. Since he’s argued that one of the roots of the industry’s malaise is its business structure, he intends to write publicly about the fascinating game of financing his startup. He’s a sharp writer and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, so that should be…fun!

Those of us who lived through successive waves of the media industry’s infatuation with the Internet from 1996 through 2000 or so may have thought we’d seen every possible folly that can arise when people mistake the Web for a broadcast medium. We had Webshows and Netshows and Netcasts and all manner of awfulness from MSN and AOL, Time-Warner and the TV networks and Disney. (I fumed in Salon about this profusion of “channels” on the youthful Web back in 1997.) When the dot-com bubble broke, it seemed we could finally bid farewell to the delusion that you can “program” for the Web just like you program TV. Through all of that nuttiness, Yahoo was one of a small handful of companies that seemed to understand the fundamentally un-TV-ish nature of the Web, and it profited steadily from that understanding.

So I nearly sputtered out a mouthful of coffee Saturday morning when I read the New York Times’ piece about Lloyd Braun, the former TV exec who is now running a big chunk of Yahoo.

As chairman of ABC’s entertainment group, Mr. Braun had a penchant for big offbeat concepts like “Lost,” which won the Emmy for best drama. At Yahoo, why not create programs in genres that have worked on TV but not really on the Web? Sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, even a short daily humorous take on the news much like Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” are in the works…. So Mr. Braun’s job is straightforward: invent a medium that unites the showmanship of television with the interactivity of the Internet.

If you read the entirety of Saul Hansell’s piece, it seems clear that Braun and his boss Terry Semel aren’t entirely ignorant of the nature of the medium they’re working in. They know that Net-based video comes in little pieces, gets remixed by the multitude and spreads virally. But I guess they can’t shake off the habits of their professional lifetimes, because it sure sounds like they’re saying something remarkably similar to what we’ve heard from the discredited peddlers of “Net shows” past: Move over, all you amateurs and geeks, and let some real broadcasters teach you how it’s done! They may be publishing material on the Web, but they still think in terms of big-splash Events and boffo shows.

I know that a lot of smart people who deeply understand the way the Net functions work at Yahoo. The company made a savvy move in bringing on Kevin Sites to lead their first real effort in original content — he’s a versatile journalist who’s been living in the online cross-currents for several years now. Maybe Yahoo will prove my skepticism wrong, and its programmers will be the first of the multitude to go down the road labeled “Let’s make the Net more like TV” and find that it’s not a dead end. But it seems more likely to me that we’ll be reading headlines in two or three or four years about Yahoo shutting down a lot of its experiments in this area, just as its predecessors did.

I have been hunkered down writing, sticking religiously to the schedule I’ve imposed on myself. But I’ll venture forth from my den over the next couple weeks for a few things.

Tonight, I’m planning to go hear Ray Kurzweil talk at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, as part of the Long Now Foundation’s seminars. I’ve always found Kurzweil’s vision of “the coming singularity” as interesting to ponder as it is hard to believe. He’s got a new book on the subject, too, titled “The Singularity is Near.”

A week from Monday, I’ll be back in San Francisco to hear B.K.S. Iyengar, the founder of modern yoga, speak. I’ve been practicing Iyengar-style yoga for more than 10 years now, though I still feel very much like a beginner; it’s kept me sane through some major crises, including becoming a parent, being a parent, nursing a company through financial straits, and trying to write a book. Iyengar is 86 now, and says this visit to the U.S. (in part a booktour) will be his last. I’ll just be hearing him lecture; my wife, Dayna Macy, leaves this weekend for a week-long conference in Colorado organized by her company, Yoga Journal, where he’s giving a workshop, too. And she’ll be blogging about it (along with a former Salon colleague, Kaitlin Quistgaard, and other Yoga Journal folks).

Two weeks from now (10/7-9) is the latest edition of the Digital Storytelling Festival, to be held for the first time in San Francisco, over at KQED headquarters. I’ll only be able to attend part of the fest this year (I’ll be participating in a presentation about the work of the late festival founder, Dana Atchley) because it’s the weekend we celebrate our boys’ birthday, too. But I’m sure the whole thing will be great.

Finally, also that week, I’ll be trying to keep up with as much as I can of the second edition of Web 2.0, Oct. 5-7. The John Battelle/O’Reilly production will be my last chance to try to keep up with this ever-fermenting industry before I go into deep-retreat mode and attempt to finish my book. (Except I’ll have to emerge some time in November, because that’s when Salon is planning special, not-yet-announced but stay-tuned-for-more, 10th-anniversary festivities!)

I registered for the New York Times Web site on the very first day it went live back in 1995 or 1996 or whenever it was. I never minded that the Times asked you to register — after all, they were providing valuable material that I wanted access to. If the registration helped them sell ads, so be it. As a once-and-likely-future editor at a Web publication that has experimented with the subscription model over the years, I’m also sympathetic to the company’s desire to add a new revenue stream. I can’t say I understand the logic of the new New York Times Select program, which takes the most popular and most-linked features of the Web site — mostly, the op-ed columnists — and puts them behind the gate. But who knows; time will tell the Times whether it made a good move.

In the meantime, the actual launch of the service seems to have encountered a mountain of glitches. I found that even though I followed the Times’ confusing double registration process for people who subscribe to the print edition (you have to create another account that’s apparently different from your basic login to the Web site), and successfully created the new account, I couldn’t actually get through to any of the “Select” content. The site reports me as logged in, but won’t show me the for-pay features. I thought maybe it was something to do with my Opera browser, but it seems like the problems are widespread.

I am always torn in these situations between compassion (I feel your pain, ye fellow launchers of complex new Web operations!) and schadenfreude (aha — if even the New York Times can’t get this stuff right, then all the difficult launches I’ve been involved with don’t hurt quite so much).

I’m sure they’ll get it worked out in a little time. We always did, too.

A long long time ago, I saw Spalding Gray perform Swimming To Cambodia and many of his other monologues. One favorite bit was his account of being rejected for a part on some hack TV show. As the casting agent told him, there was one problem — a moment when a certain look passed over his face that could only be described as…thought.

If you like to see the expression of thought on TV, I think you’re going to like The Josh Kornbluth Show. I watched my old friend’s new interview show on KQED TV for the first time tonight. (If, like me, you missed the debut show Monday night, with Rita Moreno, they’re replaying it Friday at 10:30 p.m., and apparently a bunch of other times.)

As we watched Josh talk with Sen. Barbara Boxer about her new novel, my wife said, “Look, he’s still got the notebook in his back pocket!” Sure enough, the spine of a reporter’s pad was plainly, if minutely, visible on screen.

I smiled. Ages ago, when Josh was starting out in comedy and solo performance, I’d suggested that he carry a pad around so he could capture random ideas. (It’s a good idea for anyone who expects to create stuff.) Reporter’s notebooks are the best combination of capacity and pocket-fit. I became Josh’s supplier for many years. I don’t know where he gets them now; in the old days they were hard to find outside of newsrooms, but they seem more generally available today, online and from office-supplies warehouses. (The Long Tail delivers access to the Long Notebook!)

I can imagine virtually any TV producer I’ve ever met advising the host of the show: Lose the notebook! Maybe its presence on screen was an oversight, but I’d like to think that it is instead an indication of the show’s determination to present Josh, and his guests, in all the happy untidiness of our real lives.

If I remember correctly, I offered my “carry a notebook” advice to Josh around the same time that I had the enormously fun (though also nail-biting, for reasons that will become clear) experience of performing on a live radio show with him, broadcast regularly on the MIT station, WMBR. The show, titled The Urban Happiness Radio Hour, was an eclectic combination of humor, skits and music, loosely inspired by The Prairie Home Companion but with a Josh spin of mid-80s indie hip, Red Diaper Babyism, insane puns and self-deprecating neurosis. I was one anchor of a small voice-acting troupe. Our job of enacting Josh’s skits was complicated by Josh’s habit of writing the scripts, literally, up to the last few minutes before we went on the air. In certain cases, our performances had the spontaneity and verve of first readings because…they were first readings.

From what I’m reading on the blog for Josh’s new show, his current producer is running a much tighter ship. But one of the cool things about the Josh Kornbluth Show is that Josh and KQED clearly want it to feel a little raw, a bit rough; there’s nothing amateurish about it, but it’s utterly un-slick. It’s a world away from Urban Happiness — but not a galaxy away.

Here is how the conversation might go if we could step into a Wayback Machine and travel back to, say, a couple of months after 9/11 to have a little conversation with our previous selves:

“2005?!?! My god, fill me in. These last few weeks have been rough! Give me some hope, okay?”

“Well…”

“Come on! Four years! Where did they finally find Osama? And what did they do to him?”

“Well…”

“I assume the Taliban are long gone from Afghanistan, right? This war we’re fighting can’t take too much longer.”

“Well…”

“And what with the outpouring of international support for the U.S. these days, there must be some wonderful achievements in global cooperation!”

“Well…”

“Oh, yeah, now there are these bizarre anthrax incidents… Who was it, anyway? What a relief it must have been to find that out!”

“Well…”

“You’re not saying very much. What gives?”

“You remember all that talk about Iraq at the start of the first Bush administration? They invaded.”

“Yeah? Don’t tell me — Saddam was behind the anthrax!”

“No, no…”

“Or, what, did he finally find a way to launch his own terrorist attack?”

“Nope.”

“They caught him building a nuke!”

“Well, no.”

“So…?”

“They told us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But we never found the weapons, even after we toppled him. Then they told us it didn’t matter because we were building a better democratic Iraq. Then they told us not to give up despite thousands of American casualties, because if we pulled out we’d be dishonoring the soldiers who’d already died.”

“Damn. I guess that means Bush lost the election in ’04, huh?”

“Well…”

“Anyway, the most important thing is that, four years later, the U.S. has had enough time to plan and prepare for another horror. The next time an American city is endangered, we’ll be all set, right? Swift response. Leaders who spring into action. Better communications. Organization. The can-do American spirit.”

Today’s New York Times has a piece analyzing the “recall” of FEMA’S Michael Brown to Washington. The article does not wonder how this incompetent beneficiary of patronage — and, as more recently revealed, resume-padding hack — managed to avoid being totally canned. No, this was a piece largely guided by anonymous White House sources desperate to paint the story in the light the administration sought. So we get an astonishing paragraph like this:

Mr. Bush, angry, directed the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to find out what was going on. “The frustration throughout the week was getting good, reliable information,” said the aide, who demanded anonymity so as not to be identified in disclosing inner workings of the White House. “Getting truth on the ground in New Orleans was very difficult.”

But pause a minute and ponder this line and you realize that the administration’s difficulty “getting truth” here is simply a case of chickens coming home to roost. If you run a government where you reward people who tell you what you want to hear and fire people when they tell you unpleasant truths, you should not be surprised when truth becomes a scarce commodity. The Bush administration’s “tell me no truths” stance was at work in its economic policy long before 9/11; after that calamity, it became the central modus operandi for the Executive Branch, which picked its policies first — invade Iraq while continuing to cut taxes — and then retroactively doctored its information and intelligence (either overtly, or simply by promoting those with the “right” message and firing or silencing dissenters) to fit the policy.

It’s one thing to spin, to present a doctored version of reality to the public in order to sell an agenda. But it became clear long ago that, in the Bush administration’s advanced case of delusional megalomania, the doctored version of reality has become gospel on the inside as well.

So of course Michael Brown, and all the other Michael Browns in the Bush administration, didn’t tell Bush the truth about what was happening. “Everything’s fine, sir! Carry on with your vacation!” Even if they actually knew, which seems unlikely, they understood — as you can bet every commander in Iraq knows — that to do so was to ask to be fired. Mr. Bush is to hear only what Mr. Bush (and Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rove) wants to hear. Anything else is disloyalty — a firing offence.

Any organization run on such principles is, of course, a juggernaut of dysfunction, headed for the ditch.

It’s too late for damage control in New Orleans, but they’re bailing like crazy in the White House.

The Bush administration’s new tactic for dealing with criticism over its handling of Katrina is to say that criticism equals a “blame game.” They’re saying this over and over, like a broken record. Somebody took a poll and discovered that the word “blame” has a lot of negatives, so they’re trying to plaster it on their critics.

It’s all about the angle of language attack. If you say “Stop playing the blame game,” you sound like you’re being grown-up — “blame” is what kids do when somebody’s spilled the milk. But take a few steps to the side and look at this from a different angle. The people who are being charged as “blamers” are really telling the president, “Take responsibility. Be a grown-up!”

If President Bush had gotten up the morning after Katrina and said, “I take responsibility for this situation and we’re going to work as hard as we know how, stay up round the clock, do everything in our power to save our citizens’ lives,” there’d be no blame game for anyone to play. But he did nothing of the kind. Then he compounded the mistake by letting his underlings play a “blame game” of finger-pointing at local officials. Then he had the nerve to have his press office minions complain about everyone else playing the “blame game.”

The American people — and, yes, among them are a lot of angry politicians and journalists, and a multitude of voices here on the Net who have no credentials but their own outrage — aren’t playing games. They’re angry with a leader who failed his people, and who still doesn’t understand what it means to take responsibility in a crisis.

POSTSCRIPT: In Farhad Manjoo’s Salon cover story today, Farhad interviews a former deputy chief of staff of FEMA from the last administration, George Haddow, who basically says that the whole Bush restructuring of FEMA was aimed at setting up local authorities for blame: “According to Haddow, instead of working with local officials to try to minimize the impacts of an impending storm, the White House has decided its best strategy is to keep its distance from people on the ground. That way if anything goes wrong, the White House can ‘attack, attack, attack.’ ” Read it and weep, if you have any tears left.

AND: This great post from Tim Grieve at the War Room demonstrates that, to the Bush administration, all criticism is dismissed as “politics,” and “now” is never “the time for politics” –so shut up, everyone, already!

It happens occasionally: I agree entirely with Andrew Sullivan. If President Bush wants to show that he gets how things need to change post-Katrina, he should fire Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, who demonstrated several times this week he had no idea what was going on.

Let there be some accountability. Let there be some sign that our president expects more than loyalty from the people he appoints, but also, you know, that they do their jobs. “This is a competence issue. It’s a question of national security. Fire Brown now,” says Sullivan. Yes.

If Bush takes this step, let’s note, it will be the first time our “CEO president” has held anyone in his administration responsible for any kind of error or mistake.

As I said Friday, you can’t start a Global War on tropical storms. But Doc Searls suggests that the next national effort we’re all going to need to get behind is the “War on Error.” That enemy is everywhere among us.

I was away with family yesterday and this morning and not able to follow much of the Katrina coverage in depth. But it didn’t take much catchup reading today to figure out what’s going on: the Bush administration’s counteroffensive is underway, and the focus is not on solving problems but on placing blame. The line coming from the administration — it’s well traced in a number of places, including this post from Josh Marshall — is that all the trouble with getting relief quickly enough to a devastated American city was the fault of local officials.

This Washington Post piece included a charge, anonymously sourced to a “senior Bush official” — did Karl Rove not learn his lesson from the Plame investigation? — that the governor of Louisiana had failed to declare a state of emergency. But, of course, she had. The story now sits with a big fat correction on the Post’s Web site. This is the old Rove-school tactic of planting a lie that, proverbially, can make it halfway round the world while the truth — and the newspaper correction — is still putting on its boots.

But it’s not just the president’s men anonymously pointing fingers. Here’s what the president himself had to say in his weekly radio address yesterday: “The magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities. The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable.”

Meanwhile, others in his administration are complaining about Louisiana’s tardiness in reaching out for a “multi-state mutual aid pact” and suggesting that state and local authorities failed to take quick enough action to get the federal aid that, it’s implied, Washington was just itching to send.

I don’t doubt that state and local officials made mistakes. And in due time we’ll learn much more. But this disaster is epochal in scale; one reason we have a federal government in the first place is to deal with crises when their scale is simply too great for a state to handle. Instead of taking charge, the Bush administration botched its initial reaction — and now, instead of accepting responsibility and focusing on helping the victims, its officials are covering their posteriors.

The simple juxtaposition in the Post story’s lead says it all:
“Tens of thousands of people spent a fifth day awaiting evacuation from this ruined city, as Bush administration officials blamed state and local authorities for what leaders at all levels have called a failure of the country’s emergency management.”

No one knows how many thousands are dead. A minimum of hundreds of thousands are homeless. And Bush and his men are passing the buck. It doesn’t get much lower than this.

Nowhere in his actions or statements is there any indication that President Bush understands what the American people expect of a leader faced with a situation like the one we’ve watched unfold this past week. Why are we hearing about the legalisms and the quibbling over jurisdictions and wondering about reports that help was available but waiting on paperwork? Isn’t it the role of a chief executive to know when there’s a crisis that threatens lives and mobilize all his powers to resolve it? If the locals failed to dot the i’s, shouldn’t the president himself have been on the phone with them, doing what politicians do, arguing and cajoling and shouting as needed until the people’s business was taken care of? Isn’t it the president’s job to man the executive branch with officials who know how to flag a looming crisis and say, “Boss, you better pay attention to this?” Wasn’t there anyone in the White House team who knew enough to say to Bush, “Forget the trip to California, don’t touch that guitar, get back here to Washington — we better get out in front of this thing”?

Plenty of people who haven’t in the past borne partisan animus against Bush are personally angry with him now, and rightly so. This “CEO president” has repeatedly failed in the realm that was supposed to be his strong suit — basic management. When crisis management fails on this large a scale, the calamity may only take a quick moment, a day or a week, but inevitably it has been years in the making. In Katrina’s case, it’s the kind of outcome you get when you have a national leader who never fires anyone for doing a lousy job but who instantly dismisses anyone who breaks ranks or speaks out of line. You end up with a government of incompetents and yes-men placeholders who owe their jobs to loyalty and patronage, not achievement and skill. (Cf. Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, whose chief previous experience was as lawyer for the Arabian Horse Trading Association, a job from which he was fired, “forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures,” according to the Boston Herald.)

So now we see the administration revert to type. 9/11 was Bill Clinton’s fault, and the CIA’s fault. The recession was Clinton’s fault, too. The deficit has nothing to do with tax cuts, but is the fault of the famous “trifecta” of war, recession and national emergency. The little screwup about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was, once more, the CIA’s fault, and had nothing to do with the administration’s own misuse of intelligence. And the failure to put enough boots on the ground in postwar Iraq to control the country? That must have been the fault of the generals who didn’t ask for more troops. Torture in Abu Ghraib? No one’s really to blame there except a few bad apples.

Now comes Katrina, and Bush is once again saying, don’t look at me — the buck stops nowhere. If so many lives weren’t on the line in so many places and in so many ways, it might even be funny.